From ‘after the fact’ objective analyses to immediate ‘before the fact’ living meanings

Abstract

The worlds of therapeutic interactions, and especially the worlds of our everyday social exchanges, as portrayed in the conceptualizations and theories proposed in research papers, are in fact very different from the worlds within which we all actually live our everyday lives. This is not because I think the conceptualizations and theories offered are in fact inadequate, but because as identifiable and nameable causal process they can only be seen as having been at work in people’s activities after they have been performed. ‘Something else’ altogether is guiding people in the performance of their actions than the nameable things whose nature we seek to discover in our inquiries, something in their relations to the larger circumstances of their involvements with the others and othernesses around them, rather than merely in their actions and utterances exclusively. Conceptualizations relate to observed events after the fact of their occurrence, whereas, much occurs in the experience of participants before the fact of their happening.